A redolence of enchantment clung to the air around witches, but the scent of magic transcended the olfactory. It was partly a scent and partly a sound—so faint you wouldn't catch it if you didn't know what to listen for, like the crackle of water as it frosts—but magic was mostly a feeling. It changed the very air around you as you breathed it in. Or maybe that was just the intoxication that came with a sense of something you once had and will never get back.

That hint of magic now imbued my senses.

Emilio stretched and clenched his fists. He'd picked it up too. We both moved faster down the street, our soundless steps in perfect sync.

A magical upbringing focused on the third eye, honing and mastering a witch's intuition as a first line of defense, elevating them above the mundane; but the predatory senses of a vampire were astronomical in comparison. I didn't need to see a mark. I could usually sense a witch with a couple of deep inhales.

Although, in New Orleans, it was a little trickier to track the supernatural. The jasmine-infused humidity cradled everything that traipsed through it, but tonight not even weather could hide this witch's scent. My family had searched every block of the French Quarter for Callisto's coven, and then Emilio and I had searched the Faubourgs Trémé and Marigny, and what was left of the Ninth Ward, on our own. Tonight, we'd widened our search to a more desolate part of the city. It was only fitting to be reduced to the two of us, given that we'd been entangled in this chase on and off for the last two hundred years. No matter how different were the lives we led, and how far away from each other we stayed, the Salazars always seemed to bring Emilio and me back to the same point on the globe. And Saint-Germain always brought us back to La Nouvelle-Orléans.

And suddenly it was the 1790s and 1840s and 1930s all over again, which was how we both knew with complete certainty that Callisto Salazar was not dead. The Animarum Praedators had escaped death so many times thanks to their peculiar Spektral power that I'd never believe they'd met final death until I touched their hollow, spiritless bodies with my own fingers. Not until I heard the silence coming from their chests.

The air crackled, and my fangs snapped to point. Emilio and I gave each other the exact same look. This witch was foolish enough to use magic on the street. The traces were woven through the air like an enchanted tapestry, and a loose thread was dangling right in front of us. Surely they knew we were hunting them? A part of me wondered if it was a trap. The other part of me was ready to rip my way out of it, if it meant unveiling Callisto. With hardly a signal to each other, we split off to opposite sides of the street.

Usually this particular cat-and-mouse chase brought a fire to Emilio's eyes, birthed in a time gone by when it wasn't entirely uncommon for a man to slay another in the street with his blade, and when war was an inevitable part of the male birthright. The glint was there now but overshadowed by a darkness I'd never seen in my brother. A darkness stirred by pain, loss masked by infuriation. Pain that condemned Callisto Salazar.

It had been ages since Emilio and I had so irrevocably agreed on something, but after the events at the convent, the Salazars needed to be eradicated. No more chase. No more feud.

The Salazars almost got Adele.

Because of my carelessness.

I sucked in a deep breath and moved faster, following the enchanted thread, tugging it, my desire for what we'd find on the other end becoming intemperate. I could imagine why Callis would be enthralled with this city—how he thought he was going to make it his own, build a castle where the supernatural dripped with the rain and bebopped alongside the pentatonic scales. A spiritual nexus that drew the willing and beguiled the mundane. It was no wonder descendants of so many of the Great European witching families had ended up here. New Orleans was a place you wanted to be born from and die in. Even I, who'd been drained of magic for centuries, could feel her alluring whisper begging me to stay.

As I moved quicker, an energy pummeled through my veins, making me feel alive in a way I'd forgotten. I didn't know what I was more thrilled by: being out of the attic, or the prospect of ripping Callisto Salazar's throat out, or . . . Warmth pinched my cheeks, and I brushed the thought away. It's not that, Niccolò.

The thread pulsed from a decrepit house on Emilio's side of the street that looked as rotten and feculent as I'd imagined the Animarum Praedators had been when they'd risen from their graves. I whipped across the street, rejoining my brother, and within seconds, we were both over the iron fence, pausing for a moment, feeling for the scent of magic. Inside or out?

Out.

Emilio tipped his head to the right, and I took off the other way, just in case it was a trap.

An entanglement of rosebushes had overgrown the path, their fragrance momentarily overpowering my senses, masking the enchanted bread crumbs. I stalked straight through them, thorns scraping my skin with scratches that would heal before I cleared the thicket.

My steps hastened. With Callisto, it was the same feud, the same enemy. Another city, another century. Everything was the same, but nothing was the same. This time, it wasn't just two Medici brothers fighting two Salazar siblings. This time, Callisto had a grimoire. The House of Salazar had gotten back their magic. The flip in power enthralled me.

For the first time in over four hundred years, his coven was bound.

I would never let him touch my family, and I would never let him touch her. I could still feel the thumps of her heartbeat from the other side of the attic door, the exultation I'd felt every time she'd drawn nearer.

After centuries of mundane generations, Adeline Saint-Germain finally had a magical heir.

We were so close. No one, not even Callisto Salazar, was going to stop me from taking back everything León had stolen from my family. What the hell was I thinking, letting them step foot back in that attic? The risk I'd taken was completely reckless.

I could hear Emilio crashing through from the other side of the house. He was reckless enough for all of us, but something in me—maybe it was foolish desperation—had just believed in her, Saint-Germain and all. The intuition had superseded all survival instincts, all reasonable thought, all reasonable sanity even. It was an intuition that had a pulse of magical heritage—a feeling I couldn't recall having since I was . . . a witch.

I took a deep, controlled breath to temper my creeping pulse. She'd protected me. She'd saved me. All of us. Even as Callisto was taking her magic.

Anger seethed rapidly through my bloodstream, almost reminding me of what it had been like to have my magia Elementale—those tiny pulses of electricity.

The enclave of roses led to a wooded, swampier area. Damp foliage covered the ground, so that when the twig snapped nearby, it was barely audible. I glanced over. It was just Emilio.

In silence, we took a beaten path through thickening fog, deeper into the property. I wondered if we were just tracking one witch or if this old abandoned monstrosity was where the coven had set up camp. Could we be so lucky? We passed a fountain bespattered in mire, and I imagined myself tying Callisto to it and leaving him there for scavengers to peck out his organs for the rest of eternity like Prometheus.

He'd nearly taken her from me—my only link to León. By blood and by magic. He'd nearly killed her.

Emilio looked over to me again. He was getting a read on my accelerating heartbeat; it was distracting him from the hunt. Still, I thought about him touching her. I thought about him demanding that she deliver me to his coven, and about her telling him no. Rage ripped through me.

The end of the thread led to tombstones, old and crumbling.

"Show yourself, witch," I sneered, twisting under the moonlight, searching.

He was wearing an invisibility cloak of some kind, and the false sense of protection it gave him would be his demise. The scent of magic was crackling, flaring up my sense of revenge, reminding me why we sat at the top of the food chain.

I punched through the magic and grabbed his throat. Fire burst from his hands, but his blood was already spilling into my mouth, my fangs sinking deeper into his flesh.

The flames in his palms brightened as he dug deeper for a last pull of magic.

My jaw locked, and I sucked harder, overwhelmed with the desire to hear his pulse slow to nothingness. This was where I always stopped feeding and altered their memories before letting them go. Not this one. Not tonight.

Not a Salazar.

The rush that came next nearly knocked me to the ground. It had been so long since I'd felt it: the jerk of the bloodlust.

Beneath the shadows, Emilio's face brightened. "Our Salazar years are some of my fondest with you, Niccolò. It's nice to see you being your true self."

I detached from the witch and, with one swirl of my tongue, licked the wound so it would heal—not that I had any intention of letting him live longer than he was useful to us, but there was no point in making a mess. "I'm always my true self."

He snickered. It was a lie. We both knew it.

With one shove, the witch was out of my arms and into Emilio's, who tore into his neck with a forcefulness that would startle anyone who didn't share his surname. He held the witch so tightly that his bones snapped. He cried out, and I let him, so he could feel the fear that no one was coming to his aid.

On another night, with any other person, I'd have demanded my brother be gentler, but this witch had sealed his fate when he helped steal Adele's magic—and almost her life.

My jaw tightened, and I went back for more, but I saw the rage in Emilio's eyes, and stepped back. The more my brother could work out his aggressions on the Animarum Praedators, the less I had to worry about him retaliating against Adele's coven. It would have been an exercise in futility to try to stop Emilio from killing in his current state of mourning. The more strategic choice was to try to guide his rage. The runs, the hunts, the kills, the feedings were all good for the greater safety of the town.

"Silenzio," I said to the witch as he writhed beneath Emilio's bite, and after that moment, he did not so much as whimper beneath the weight of my hypnotic thrall, not even when the blood spilled from Emilio's mouth as he sucked faster than he could swallow.

I could tell he was distracted. My brother might be maniacal, but he wasn't sloppy. He was simply belligerent over the loss of his child.

The fact that, Emilio, two-months-starved, had sunk his fangs into Callisto Salazar, and dropped him free, was a testament to his true feelings for Brigitte Dupré Le Moyne, which I'd always found perplexing. Never had I thought that either of us would make a child, not in our whole immortal lifetimes—for two entirely different reasons, of course.

Every vampire understood the pull to the Maker. If I thought about her long enough, I still longed for Séraphine, despite the hatred I'd harbored for her—that feeling would stay buried deep inside of me, locked within a box within a box within a box. Each with a code. Each with a key. Each made of impenetrable steel. But it was only in the last decade, seeing the way Emilio had changed when he was around Brigitte, that I began to understand the pull on the Maker. He may have bitten and turned her in a move of strategic warfare, but he loved her more than I'd ever seen him love anything, other than himself and battle. He hadn't loved anyone like that since Giovanna. Even though he'd hidden it well, he'd been truly devastated when we didn't find our dear sweet sister in the attic with Gabriel as we'd hoped. But I knew my brother; he couldn't hide from me.

And so, the fact that he could nurture anyone had stunned me. When he'd dropped Callisto to run to Brigitte's aid, he'd revealed a flicker of humanity I hadn't known existed in him, not as vampire nor as man.

The witch sank to the ground underneath my brother's pull. Now that we'd caught one of them, pleasure stirred inside me. This wasn't just for Emilio; this was about Medicean revenge.

I bent to the Ghost Drinker's face. "By the time my family is finished with you tonight, you will be begging the gods for your mortality."

A blood-high beamed from Emilio as he licked the witch's wounds clean. The punctures began closing instantly—if only I'd understood the medical benefits of vampire saliva back when León and I were in our lab and Séraphine was in our cage.

Emilio shoved his prey forward and told him to walk, but the witch slumped to the ground.

I grabbed him by the back of the collar and lifted him up. "Walk, unless you want to be dragged."

He miraculously found the strength.

As we followed behind, I continued to think about all that had happened over the last few months. Though partially cursed and without my sister, my family was back together. Adeline Saint-Germain finally had a magical descendant. León had an heir. And we were all here, tiptoeing through the je ne sais quoi of La Louisanne.

Perhaps the most intriguing part—what stirred my imagination and my fear most of all—was that Callisto had restored his Elemental magic. In my four hundred years of life, I'd never heard of such a thing, nor could I find any such tales in the histories of witchcraft. And not only that, but I'd put my faith in a Saint-Germain. I'd trusted my intuition, and in turn she had saved me from certain death from the oldest Medicean enemy to still roam the planet—one whose family had once been the greatest threat to the entire European witching world. A family whose darkness Adele could not yet comprehend, and who had utterly deserved to be stripped of their magic by our father all those years ago.

Adele was magical.

She made me feel magical.

"Niccolò . . . ?" Emilio asked.

"Cosa?"

"You're smiling."

"No, I'm not."